The market, Salonica

The market, Salonica

Saturday, 22 November 2014

Graeme and Cinzia

For the expat in
Salonica, there were more eating places than sexual partners. If you left out the ones that were too noisy, were full of
smoke, or stank of retsina, there weren’t so many places, but there weren’t so many partners,
either.

When
it came to swapping soul mates, Graeme with an e
was pretty quick, like the rest of us, though he wasn’t so quick at everything. I said I might go and work in Pakistan. His face brightened. Looking back, he probably just wanted to get rid of me, but at the time I said pleasantly, “You could do it too.”

“No,
I couldn’t.”

“Yes,
you could.”

“I’m
telling you I couldn’t.”

I
didn’t know him well enough then. He was
certainly edgy. I thought he missed his
wife, who was still in Australia. He told
me she was coming over soon. I tried
another genial comment, one that couldn’t fail.

“That’s
good news.”

“Is
it?”

His
wife’s name was Cinzia, pronounced chintzier,
with an ee if you’re Italian,
although she wasn’t. We had a meal when
she arrived. She told me how they met. She was studying.

“He
was the coolest tutor at uni.”

Then
she giggled knowingly at Graeme.

“You
had a ponytail!”

It
was a loving giggle, too. I pictured the ponytail. Graeme turned his
face away, like an aside in a play, and twisted it.It was the last time I saw them together.

Someone organised a day trip to Litóchoron, the village at the bottom of Mt
Olympus. Climbers go there before
they set off for the peak. We weren’t
doing that today, just having a nice walk on the paths around the village.

I
kept sniggering.

“I
wish you wouldn’t laugh like that,” someone said.

“I'm laughing at Cinzia.”

“I
know.”

“Did
you see her earrings?” someone asked.

“They’re
not earrings,” I replied. “They’re portable televisions.”

Graeme
hadn’t come. For the wife, it was another
pointless trip, a mountain that she wasn’t going to climb.

I
thought I'd drop in and see him. I didn't quite make it. There was a café between the bus stop and his
flat, and I saw him with a girl who wasn’t Cinzia. They were sitting at an outside table,
not a good place if you'd rather not be seen.
Perhaps he didn’t care, or had nothing to hide. Still, in the half second before he saw me, I
felt that something needed to be hidden. I wasn’t sure what. They were earnest, not overly romantic, but his
body had more meaning than when Cinzia was around. The moment he noticed me, whatever it was fell
away. He wasn’t expecting visitors. Not Graham with an h, anyway. I could tell from his face.

The
three of us had a conversation, a sad, disturbing conversation. At times like this, you pick something neutral
to talk about, like cats or travel. You
can’t go wrong there. I mentioned my trip
to Vergina, where they found Philip of Macedon’s tomb, but I
pronounced it the wrong way. The woman
laughed. “I like that – excavating
vagina.”

When
no one else laughed, she apologised. Silence.Her face brightened again. She
turned to Graeme the way I used to do, with encouragement: “You said you were going to Pakistan.”

About Me

Spaid once slept in a
cemetery in Greece (it seemed like the safest place to spend the night outside). He was
forced off a bus in India by window-smashing rioters. He’s been robbed, and
mistaken for a thief, a priest, a concert pianist, Woody and Tony Blair. He was
examined by a dentist called Dr Fang. The rest isn't silence...

BBC Radio broadcast a
separate, humorous story set in South India. Like this story, tireless: reflects his
experiences in different countries and jobs.

An
Australian, he has travelled in over thirty countries, working as a language tutor
in Greece, Italy and Taiwan, as well as a teacher in India, Australia and the
UK, where he now lives with his wife.

From the author...

tireless: celebrates the creative
urge while satirizing the people who create.
I wanted to write a book that would keep attention on any page you
turned to, so the person who looked over your shoulder on the train to see what
you were reading would only look away when their station had come.

Harassed? Unloved?
Just watching life go by? Take
this hilarious ride through the narrator’s painful
world and find others who are even worse off than you. Next door you’ll meet
Jim and his outrageous
stories, the unattainable Olga, their dysfunctional children – as well as the
appalling Rat and his companion, Roquefort, who’ll work their way into your
life as they do with everybody else. In
thissatireon human behaviour,
they’re not fair, not fair at all.

The narrator, an
unemployed teacher and aspiring writer, lives in London.When Jim and Olga move in next door, his
imagination is fired by the unhappy wife’s nude sunbathing and the pompous
husband’s breathtaking tall stories.He
recalls his comic victories in the classroom, while fantasizing that Britain’s
south-east has broken off from the mainland.He remembers his own schooldays and considers the impact of young Miss
Bugler.These anecdotes, like Jim’s
stories, highlight the casual cruelties and misunderstandings in human
behaviour and the evasive nature of fulfilment.A turning point is Jim’s recollection of a night in India when he
hallucinated, suffering the taunts of the giant Rat and his close friend,
Roquefort, a miniature cat.Humiliated
by publishers’ rejections, by the rudeness of Jim’s daughter, Daisy, and even
by his barber, the narrator transfers his sense of failure to Rat, who enters
the narrative in a series of disturbing, yet uproarious adventures which merge
illusion with the real world.The
narrator removes the barber’s head, takes revenge on Daisy when she develops an
infatuation for him, and finally publishes something,
in contrast to a now unlucky Rat, who is arrested, almost has a nervous
breakdown, is refused restaurant service, anddisappoints
as an undergraduate at Oxford, where the noisy love-making of Bill and Penny
emphasises his loneliness.

‘A colon comes in handy
here, before examples: two dots on top of one another, like the cowboys who
copulate on Brokeback Mountain, on a slope so far away you need binoculars to
see them properly.’ ... from the chapter RAT
ARRESTED! in tireless: